Flood control.
As topics go, few seem as boring, or disconnected from everyday life, or in need of NoDoz.
Until the heavy rains come and the rivers rise dramatically, or until there’s deep water surrounding the Yolo Causeway like a vast brown sea with white caps, or until the governor is touring Sacramento levees and declaring a state of emergency in 16 counties.
Then the topic becomes as real as a wet sandbag and everyone starts paying attention.
That’s what is happening now, in the wake of last weekend’s strong storms that dumped several inches of rain over Northern California, causing scattered damage to homes and businesses, road closures and jitters among government officials and residents alike.
The Bee did a solid job of covering the storms, from the writing and reporting to the splendid photography and graphics to the space made available in the paper for the coverage.
As well as the paper did in covering the storms as breaking news, though, the foundation for it was built a few months ago when the weather was hot and dry.
From my view, that’s the important background story, and it has had positive implications for the paper, its readers and the region as a whole -with the potential for literally rearranging the landscape, depending on the government’s response to the threat of catastrophic flooding.
It’s also a tale of bottom-up decision making, pushed by a small group of energetic reporters passionate about a story idea in the public’s interest. They convinced senior editors about the story’s value, and the editors committed the paper’s resources to the endeavor.
The Bee has covered regional flood control issues for many years. In 2004, for example, the paper published the award-winning series “Rising Risk” by reporter Stuart Leavenworth.
But it’s fair to say flood protection was not high on government’s list of priorities, with some issues left unresolved for decades.
Then came Hurricane Katrina late last summer and the status quo no longer felt comfortable.
The notion that a major American city could be devastated and turned into a ghost town by floodwater became an unrelenting 24-hour reality. And if much of New Orleans was under water because of levee failures and government inertia, the same could happen to Sacramento, which shares a similar susceptibility.
This says it best:
“There is … no major city in America more at risk of a catastrophic New Orleans-style flood than Sacramento.
“That is the firm and unnerving conclusion drawn from a Bee survey of the 30 largest metropolitan areas in the nation. … Compared with other big cities, Sacramento is marked by a potentially deadly combination of geographic, hydrological and demographic factors unmatched anywhere in the United States.”
That sobering assessment was in a front page story Oct. 30 by reporter Deb Kollars. It was the first of more than a dozen stories published so far, with more on the way in the coming months, that are examining the region’s flood vulnerability with a kick-in-the-butt sense of post-Katrina urgency.
It was Kollars, along with her colleagues Matt Weiser and Carrie Peyton Dahlberg, who felt the paper needed to strongly re-think and re-examine its flood-control coverage with a new sense of relevance even as the waters in New Orleans had yet to recede. They put together a proposal and pitched it to the editors.
The editors embraced the idea and the proposal became the project called “Tempting Fate.” The three reporters, working with two editors – Deborah Anderluh and Amy Pyle – were assigned full-time to the story, which will continue for several months.
For a paper The Bee’s size, that’s a major commitment of people, time and resources to a single topic that also involves photographers, graphic artists and sacbee.com.
It appears, though, the reinvigorated interest is also reflected among readers.
As part of its coverage, the paper provided online a series of detailed neighborhood maps from the city and county of Sacramento showing hypothetical levee breaks, evacuation routes, flood depths, rescue zones and the time it would take for water to rise in various areas.
The reader response was unprecedented at sacbee.com, said Ralph Frattura, The Bee’s director of interactive products. In just the first three days after the maps were placed online, they were downloaded nearly 50,000 times, especially remarkable given the large size of the map files.
Last weekend, the powerful storms spiked interest anew, as nearly 40,000 maps were downloaded from Dec. 28 through Jan. 3. There were 85,000 page views of the Tempting Fate section during the same period, and 250,000 page views of storm coverage by the paper’s photo staff.
As a result of the ongoing project, when the storms hit, the three reporters, who were already well-versed on regional flood control issues, were in perfect position to take the lead on coverage, rotating reporting shifts to produce quality, well-sourced stories over a period of several days.
“We made a decision that this is urgent enough to put three reporters on it,” said City Editor Stuart Drown of the project. “We want to break through the complacency.”
In my mind, these are issues of broad public interest that newspapers, more than any other medium, are best suited to explore.
The potential here is to change, refocus and sustain the debate about how best to protect the region from a catastrophic flood, something that affects everyone.
Katrina showed that the best laid plans weren’t good enough, and it has made everything different.
